This invention relates to pressure sensors and more particularly to systems that measure and characterize pressure distributions on rigid aerodynamic and/or hydrodynamic surfaces which are subjected to dynamic and/or static pressure fields.
Prior art utilize measuring systems that employ a plurality of pitot tubes and/or a plurality of solid state discrete semiconductor pressure transducers located at predetermined positions on the surface. The discrete pressure sensing instruments report information related only to the pressure sensed at a discrete position on the surface. Appropriate instrumentation is used to compute the desired pressure distributions from the discrete transducer measurements.
A Primary shortcoming of the prior art is the severely limited spatial resolution and system accuracy. The spatial resolution is restricted due to physical constraints of the pressure sensing instruments and discrete measuring technique utilized by the prior art. The localized nature of the measured data and the procedure utilized to approximate a continuous spatial representation from discrete measurements may severely limit the system's accuracy. As a result these systems require substantial electronic support and appropriate instrumentation with high computational requirements to compensate for the inability to sense the pressure at a continuum of locations on the surface. Thus, these type systems are capable of only approximating the actual dynamic pressure parameters of the entire surface from the discrete measurements along the surface. Furthermore, these systems tend to be heavy, large and high cost designs.